On Advent 4

This is the last of my weekly posts through Advent commenting on the Sunday prayer book lections. However, I have to say that I have found writing these little posts to be valuable exercise, so I’m thinking of continuing them but moving them behind a paywall in the future. But I don’t mean to get ahead of myself:

The Epistle reading, Philippians 4:4-7 begins with an injunction to joyfulness: “rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, rejoice.” This isn’t the only place where St Paul makes joy a central part of the Christian life; in Galatians 5 it is listed as one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. It’s clearly important to his account of what it means to live a life following Jesus. But to be honest, I’m not sure how many of us are terribly good at rejoicing, in the Lord or otherwise. I’m definitely not convinced that I am. In fact, joy can be seen as somehow immature, a sign of insufficient grappling with the ills and sins of the present moment, of privilege or ignorance (willful or otherwise). To be Serious with a capital-s requires something like low-grade depression. Otherwise, can you really claim to be reckoning with social injustice, or the climate crisis, or rapid and widespread church decline, or widespread mainline apostasy, or the collapse of the labour movement, or the West’s drift towards nihilism, or Trump, or [insert preferred crisis here]? It’s an attitude, I think, that social media particularly fosters, but it is hardly unique to those who spend a lot of time online.

Yet here we have the Word of God: rejoice! Indeed, the letter to the Philippians is filled with discussion of rejoicing, despite the fact that Paul writes this while himself imprisoned to a congregation that is facing some sort of opposition or persecution. Rejoice, Paul says — and he says from more difficult circumstances, and to people in more difficult circumstances, than most of us reading this will likely encounter.

But of course, joy is not typically a state that we can muster up on demand; telling others or oneself “just be happy!” rarely achieves the desired effect. So how is it that we are to cultivate the joy — not just any generic joy, but joy in the Lord — to which Scripture calls us?

Here the old Sunday school answer is the correct one: the ground of our joy is found in Christ Jesus. For in him we are assured that God is for us, that God has truly taken away all our sins and freely given us eternal life, so that we do not need to look on God with fear and dread. Because of this, we can truly rejoice in God, find joy in him and what he has done for us. And when we find that joy in God, it’s not that the trials of life — the many reasons not to be joyful — go away. They’re still there. Nor should we simply ignore them, putting our heads in the sand and pretending nothing is wrong. But we can, as Wendell Berry puts it, be joyful even though we’ve considered all the facts…because the most important fact there is, the Fact from which all other facts take their being, has joined himself to us and made us his children, loves and cares for us, promises us regeneration now and eternal life forever with him.

Thus Luther in his postil on this Epistle:

But what does the Gospel promise other than that Christ is given for us; that he bears our sins; that he is our Bishop, Mediator, and Advocate before God, and that thus only through him and his work is God reconciled, are our sins forgiven and our consciences set free and made glad? When this sort of faith in the Gospel really exists in the heart, God is recognized as favorable and pleasing. The heart confidently feels his favor and grace, and only these…Essentially, the fruits of such a faith are love, peace, joy, and songs of thanksgiving and praise. It will enjoy unalloyed and sincere pleasure in God as its supremely beloved and gracious Father, a Father whose attitude toward itself has been wholly paternal, and who, without any merit on its part, has richly poured out upon that heart his goodness.

Such is the rejoicing, mark you, of which Paul here speaks — a rejoicing where is no sin, no fear of death or hell, but rather a glad and all-powerful confidence in God and his kindness.

And this present moment gives us a particular opportunity to cultivate this sort of joy. For one of the means that the Spirit uses to stir up that joy in us is the regular remembrance of the saving acts of God throughout the liturgical year. It’s not that the calendar is directly divinely established from on high. But rather, as Hooker argued when defending the Prayer Book calendar against his ‘disciplinarian’ opponents, he argued that “joy of minde…riseth from the manifold considerations of Gods unspeakeable mercie, into which considerations wee are led by occasion of sacred times.” That is, Hooker says that the various feasts and festival seasons are there to lead us into a joyous contemplation of Christ’s works for us. They are here to edify, not just in the sense of imparting information, but also in stirring up our affections, increasing our love and gratitude towards God. They are there to remind us, amidst all the business and destructions of life, of the good news of Jesus upon which our joy is grounded, so that being renewed in faith we might break forth in joy.

And so, as we approach the celebration of Christmas, my prayer for all of us is that keeping this holy day would indeed be a means by which the Lord increases our joy in him. May we all set aside the posture of worldly-wise despondency that is all to easy to assume. May the observances of Christmas and the days following bring us to contemplate the glorious truth that God became a human being in Christ Jesus for you and for me, to save us from our sins and share with us his indestructible divine life — and, in contemplating this truth, rejoice.

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined…For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever.